MAC-10
The MAC-10, properly the Ingram M10, is a very compact submachine gun designed by the American engineer Gordon Ingram in the 1960s and made by the Military Armament Corporation from 1970. Built from simple sheet-steel stampings and chambered for .45 ACP or 9mm, it is little bigger than a large pistol but fires at more than a thousand rounds a minute. With the bulky suppressor designed for it, it was meant as a weapon for special forces. It saw limited military use, but its small size and fearsome rate of fire made it famous in films and notorious in crime.
Also known as M10, M-10, Ingram M10, Ingram MAC-10, MAC M10, Military Armament Corporation Model 10
Origins
Gordon B. Ingram was an American designer who had been building submachine guns since the late 1940s. In 1964 he produced the M10, a gun designed to be as small and cheap as possible while firing a full-power pistol cartridge. Ingram teamed up with Mitchell WerBell III, whose company Sionics made sound suppressors, and in 1970 investors formed the Military Armament Corporation (MAC) in Georgia to build the gun. The initials of the company stuck, and the M10 became known everywhere as the MAC-10. A smaller version, the M11, fired the .380 ACP cartridge.
Design & Construction
The MAC-10 is little more than a steel box. Its receiver is made from stamped sheet metal, and the bolt wraps around the rear of the barrel, a layout also used by the Uzi, which keeps the gun very short. The magazine fits inside the pistol grip, and a wire stock slides out from the rear for firing from the shoulder. It fires from an open bolt, and because the bolt is short and light the rate of fire is extremely high, over a thousand rounds a minute. A full magazine empties in under two seconds. The .45 version used 30-round magazines adapted from those of the M3 Grease Gun, and the 9mm version used 32-round magazines. The barrel is threaded for WerBell's suppressor, a long tube wrapped in heat-resistant fabric that doubled as a front grip. Suppressed, the gun was surprisingly quiet, because the .45 ACP bullet travels below the speed of sound. A small strap at the muzzle gave the firer something to hold when shooting without the suppressor.
Service
Ingram and WerBell hoped to sell the gun to special operations units, and in the last years of the Vietnam War a small number of suppressed Ingrams were tried by American special forces. Large orders never came. The Military Armament Corporation went bankrupt in the mid-1970s, and later companies built the design under various names. Small numbers were sold to police forces and to the militaries and security services of several countries. Its size made it attractive for bodyguards and hostage-rescue teams, but many professional users found it hard to control and inaccurate beyond a few meters, and compact guns such as the HK MP5 took most of the market.
Legacy
The MAC-10 found its real fame in the 1970s and 1980s, in action films, television and news stories about the drug trade. Cheap semi-automatic versions sold to civilians could be converted to automatic fire, which led US authorities to reclassify open-bolt semi-automatic guns of this kind in 1982, and the MAC-type pistols were named in the federal assault weapons ban of 1994. Today original Military Armament Corporation guns and Sionics suppressors are collectors' items, and the MAC-10 remains a symbol of the Cold War era's small, fast-firing submachine guns.
Sources
Hogg, Ian V., and John Weeks. Military Small Arms of the 20th Century. Arms and Armour Press, 1973 and later editions.
Ezell, Edward Clinton. Small Arms of the World. 12th edition, Stackpole Books, 1983.
Truby, J. David. Silencers, Snipers & Assassins. Paladin Press, 1972.
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